Saturday, July 20, 2013

Scott Britz-Cunningham's "Code White," the movie

For me, this is an easy question to answer, since at an early stage I adopted Rachel Weisz as a model for my protagonist, Ali O’Day.

Ali is a young neurosurgeon (as young as one can be after four years of college, four years of medical school, six years of neurosurgery residency and a couple years of research fellowship). She’s struggling to establish herself in one of the last bastions of male chauvinism in medicine, but her heaviest challenges come from within. Born in Egypt (her maiden name is Aliyah Sabra Al-Sharawi), she suffered a profound trauma as a young girl, which has left her with a condition called thymophobia — an extreme, at times physically disabling, aversion to any expression of strong emotion. She tries to escape into the almost monastically calm world of the operating room and laboratory, and uses yoga to keep her thoughts in check. But it’s all in vain. Underneath her surgeon’s mask she hides a volcano of feeling, all the stronger for having been repressed.

During the eleven hours in which the book takes place, a bomb threat to Ali’s hospital progressively strips away all of her emotional defenses. In the end, she discovers that the bomb plot in question is...[read on]